‘D-Day,’ by Rick Atkinson with Kate Waters

May 9, 2014

Children’s Books

By STEVE SHEINKIN

On the morning of May 5, 1944, 146 Allied generals, admirals, officers and staff members filed past military policemen into the chilly auditorium of St. Paul’s School in London. German bombs had blown out 700 of the school’s windows; its students had been evacuated to the countryside. The military men sat on hard benches with overcoats buttoned, blankets on laps. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, standing before a 30-foot-wide plaster relief map of the coast of Normandy, announced that if anyone saw a problem with the plan the group was about to hear, he should speak up. “I have no sympathy with anyone,” he said, “whatever his station, who will not brook criticism.” Then the “wiry, elfin” British Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery began, “in his reedy voice, each word as sharply creased as his trousers,” to describe the invasion intended to mortally wound Hitler’s Third Reich.

This is the dramatic opening of Rick Atkinson’s “D-Day,” a new addition to what may qualify as a mini-trend in publishing: the adaptation of adult nonfiction titles for younger readers. Excellent recent examples include James Swanson’s “The President Has Been Shot!” and Neal Bascomb’s “The Nazi Hunters.” For “D-Day,” Atkinson condenses the opening section of “The Guns at Last Light,” the third volume of his award-winning Liberation Trilogy, to create this vivid and detailed depiction of the invasion of Normandy.

Even before the first chapter ends, Atkinson confronts one of the major challenges of writing history for this age group — providing context without killing the story’s momentum. Having set up the scene of the meeting at St. Paul’s, he summarizes the events of the war since September 1939, and then jumps back to the preparations for D-Day. From there, short chapters give glimpses of the training, the men (the average American soldier was 5-foot-8, 144 pounds), the mountains of supplies amassed on the British coast (2.6 million small arms, 800,000 pints of blood) and the efforts the Allies took to camouflage the buildup from German planes and spies.

The narrative picks up speed when it hits the night of June 5, as thousands of glider troops and paratroopers rub charcoal and cocoa on their faces before the short flight over the English Channel. Atkinson excels in conveying the unglamorous chaos of combat, with men “slipping on the vomit-slick floor” of their planes or drowning in the muddy water of flooded fields, or tossed to the ground like toys when their flimsy gliders disintegrated upon landing. Then comes sunrise on June 6, D-Day. Atkinson describes a French boy waking up to see the largest amphibious landing ever attempted (“more ships than sea,” the boy recalled). Seasick soldiers jump from landing craft into churning green water. They wade toward beaches defended by a murderous mix of mines, machine guns and artillery.

The action isn’t presented through the eyes of individual leaders or specific soldiers. Instead, the main character is the invasion itself, the epic size of it, the stunning numbers of ships and planes and soldiers, the heroism of the men and the many, many ways to die. Atkinson’s attention moves from one beach to the next as he describes the strategic significance and special horrors of each battle.

At just 200 or so pages, with photos on nearly every spread, “D-Day” has the look of a book for young readers. But it isn’t written like one. Much of the text is taken unchanged from Atkinson’s adult trilogy. “The accidental beach proved pleasingly benign,” he writes, and elsewhere, “the amber orb of a full moon rose through a thinning overcast off the port bow.” This high tone works well because it respects the intelligence of its audience. The best children’s books are never written for readers of a specific age, anyway.

When I visit schools to talk about my own books, many students express enthusiasm for rich and challenging nonfiction. Maybe they’re just being nice, but we’re talking about middle schoolers here. There seems to be genuine interest in true stories, dramatic, unsettling, fast-paced stories, and I’m confident that even students battered by textbooks into believing that history is boring can still be won over. The thing is, you can’t just tell kids that history is cool; you have to prove it, and Atkinson does.

D-DAY

Adapted From “The Guns at Last Light”

By Rick Atkinson with Kate Waters

202 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $18.99. (Middle grade; ages 10 and up)

Steve Sheinkin is the author, most recently, of “Bomb: The Race to Build — and Steal — the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon,” and “The Port Chicago 50.”